IKONIK System Cases: Taran A20 and Zaria A20 SIM. Page 5

Our today’s article is devoted to two system cases from IKONIK – a company that has emerged in this market fairly recently. Both cases we are going to discuss belong to the most widely spread tower-type.

Finally, we can take a look at the open case from the other side. In the ordinary version we’d see two fans and empty space behind the HDD rack, but we’ve got the SIM version of the case. What does it mean?

SIM stands for System Intelligent Management (SIM). The hardware part of this system is a square box fastened behind the 5.25-inch bays and a set of cables for connecting up to four fans to it. Thus, SIM can only be used to control fans.

Do not forget to power the box and connect four thermocouples to it. It is on the readings of those thermocouples that the speeds of the fans connected to the SIM box will depend, if you want that. By default, both 80mm fans on the side panels are connected via an adapter to one channel, so the fourth channel is free.

What does the software part of the SIM system do?

The main screen of the software shows the current speeds of the fans and the readings of the thermal sensors. You can also learn the model name of your system case and see the placement of fans in it but you cannot learn what fan is connected to what channel. You can enable/disable the highlighting of all the fans at once.

In the Controls section you can specify the operation mode for each of the four tracked channels. There are four modes available:

Performance (full speed)

Silent (the fan is working at the lowest speed until the temperature reported by the thermal sensor assigned to it reaches a certain threshold; after that the fan speed is growing up proportionally to the temperature until maximum speed)

0dB Start (similar to the previous mode, but the fan does not work at all when the temperature is low; it turns on when the temperature reaches a certain threshold and then accelerates proportionally to the temperature until maximum speed)

Fanless (the fan is turned off)

For the Silent and 0dB modes you can choose one of two variants of fan acceleration (which is effected by increasing voltage in the appropriate channel) depending on temperature. The difference is at what temperature the fan speed begins to grow up.

As for the fans in our particular case, the maximum speed is 1700rpm for the 140mm fan on the front panel, 1850rpm for the 120mm fan on the back panel, and 2600rpm for the 80mm fans on the side panel. The respective minimums are 1000, 1100 and 1700rpm.

The final screen is called Alarm. Here you can assign thermal sensors to fan control channels and specify alarm temperatures for each of them.

There are no problems with assembling a computer in this system case: there is a generous 275 millimeters of space for your graphics card. The case is also wide. In many system cases with crosswise positioning of HDDs, the side panel often presses against their connectors dangerously. Here, there is enough space for everything.

There is only one thing that left us perplexed. Even the rather short PSU we use (140 millimeters long, which is the standard length of an ATX power supply) partially covers one of the side fans. Thus, a longer PSU will fully block that fan, reducing its efficiency to zero (except when you use a Hiper PSU with meshed panels). You will see shortly how necessary these fans are anyway.

The fan’s highlighting is not too bright and barely visible through the mesh of the case. The Power and Disk Access indicators hidden under the large front button are only visible by the reflection they leave on the desk. This is good for people who don’t like too bright illumination.